While most marketers are busy figuring out what e-commerce
can do for people, Sherry Turkle is more concerned about
what it is doing to people.

Turkle, a professor of the sociology of
science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has
been called an ethnologist of on-line life, a cybershrink,
and the Margaret Mead of cyberspace.

Exaggerations? Perhaps. But this much is
true: as a pundit, Turkle has carved a national niche for
herself as an authoritative commentator on the existential
topic of how the Internet is transforming people's behavior
and sense of self. In 1995, Newsweek magazine named her in
its "50 for the Future: the Most Influential People to Watch
in Cyberspace." In 1997, Time Digital Magazine put her on
its list of the top 50 "Cyber Elite."

As millions of consumers flock on-line to
do everything from checking stock quotes to searching for
that 1955 Roy Rogers lunchbox, life on the Internet has
taken on a mystical aura. The fascination has led many
Internet-watchers to Turkle's doorstep in search of higher
meaning.

To satisfy the masses, she has dispensed
humanist perspectives on one of man's coldest creations. Her
books-- "The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit,"
(Simon and Schuster, 1984) and "Life on the Screen: Identity
in the Age of the Internet" (Simon and Schuster, 1995) --
deal with how computers have changed the way people interact
with the world and view themselves.

Turkle views the world of electronic
commerce in philosophical fashion. One of her recurrent
messages: the Internet will not replace stores, boutiques,
shopping malls, and supermarkets. Instead, browsing on-line
will only whet people's appetite for the real
thing.

As evidence, Turkle points to
"City
of Bits" (MIT Press), a book
published by MIT colleague, William Mitchell. Viewers can
read the entire book on-line for free. Instead of dampening
sales, Turkle posits that the on-line version has boosted
sales of the physical book.

"It has increased the appetite for the
book itself," Turkle says. "People wanted the experience of
the book, its functionality, its ease of
maneuverability."

The same is true of the shopping
experience.

"I sense myself as a consumer who has
access to many, many different kinds of media for getting
information," she says. "I experience the product at a
store. I see it in a catalog in a setting I can fantasize
about. I can go on-line to learn more about it, its ratings,
its price points. All this information goes into a
purchasing decision, and increasingly, we are becoming
better and better at it. It's changing the experience of
being a consumer. People are becoming connoisseurs of
information."

To those who see the on-line buying
experience as being too cold, or too dehumanizing, Turkle
says the criticism is a red herring.

"Too often, the computer is compared to
what it would be like living in a small village," Turkle
says. "They imagine a cafe in France where people meet daily
and you come across the same cast of characters. They set up
a 19th century ideal and compare the computer to it. What
we're really doing is confronting what we miss most in the
rest of our lives. . . As a mirror for society, it's a very
telling comment."

It is that yearning for the human touch
that will preserve roles and functions that ought to belong
in the human domain. To illustrate, Turkle turns to the
anecdote, a tool she uses liberally in her books to bring
lofty philosophical ideas into easily digestible
form.

"I was interviewing an 11-year-old about
artificial intelligence," Turkle says. "He said, 'When there
are robots who can perform all the jobs, people will still
cook the food, run the restaurant and have families. I guess
they'll still be the ones who will go to church.' He was
saying that you have to accept computers for what they can
do, but that there are still things that only people can do,
like form relationships and develop
spirituality."

Turkle is less sanguine, however, when it
comes to the subject of on-line trading of stocks. Likening
it to a "casino atmosphere," she cautions against the
addictive quality of stock trading that can lead to
financial ruin for individuals. She worries about how day
trading, as the practice is called, can contribute to, in
fact feeds on, the volatility of the stock
market.

"Clearly there will always be
speculators," she says. "But as this phalanx of Americans
move into day-trading, you begin to create a stock market
that feels like a casino. It becomes a closed game of
winners and losers, increasingly disconnected from economic
life."

These days, however, Turkle is occupied
with a more down-to-earth topic than macroeconomics. A
mother of a 7-year-old girl, Turkle is interested in how
technology affects children. Her current research topic: The
Furby, a fuzzy, computerized, mechanized doll that talks,
blinks, sleeps and asks to be fed.

"So much of the conversation is about how
'smart' the Furby is," says Turkle. "But I think the story
is not so much what's in the Furby so much as what it
triggers in the child."

So far, Turkle has observed a crucial
difference in how children connect with a Furby as opposed
to a doll that behaves completely predictably. "This lack of
predictability causes us to see them in a different light,"
Turkle says. "In the future, these toys can socialize us
into being used to the idea that machines are not always
predictable and shapes the way we relate to
them."

Watching children play with technology,
Turkle has uncovered a generational difference. While people
over 30 are socialized to read directions and approach
technology with linear logic, children simply plunge in.
"With the Furby, children don't read the instructions," she
says. "They just pick it up and start playing. The computer
culture rewards this type of tinkering, this type of
cognitive risk-taking. I call it the triumph of
tinkering."